I am no violet, and I know that politics is an ugly business. But I must say: The attempted destruction of Gov. Sarah Palin — by some of the worst forces in this country — is making me sick. You? For most of our lives, we have heard squawks from the left about civil liberties. Also about the “politics of personal destruction.” I know they hate her, politically and personally. But won’t some of them stand up against what is happening now? Just for the sake of a semblance of integrity?

And, by the way: The argument that Sarah Palin is less prepared than Barack Obama is laughable. It basically comes down to: “I think Barack’s smarter than Sarah. And cooler — less country.” A few days after the Republican convention — before talking points really gelled — I went on Irish radio (from the comfort of my home in New York). A man on the other end was not able to say that Obama had more experience. So he said, “He has a more rounded intelligence.”

This was after he had heard one speech by Sarah Palin. And the obvious core of his objection was: She’s a conservative.

As usual, what is rotten is all the pretending: all the pretending about experience and censored books and whether she has traveled widely enough. If they’d only say, “She’s a conservative, and that is intolerable,” that would be fine. It would even be welcome. But they have to go into all this other, and destroy the woman personally.

And once they stigmatize and caricature a person, that person usually stays stigmatized and caricatured — as with Quayle, as with Bork. Reagan, somehow, managed to escape the noose. How about “our Sarah”? In reality, she is a reformist governor and a heartwarming American success story. Will they — you know: “they” — succeed in making her an extremist dunce?

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Feminists 4 Sarah Palin · “Palin’s candidacy brings both figurative and literal feminist change. The simple act of thinking outside the liberal box, which has insisted for generations that only liberals and Democrats can be trusted on issues of import to women, is the political equivalent of a nuclear explosion” Tammy Bruce